Demon Seed
by Addiction
Summary: Eyes like Nia under a different name because I don't know what I want to call it yet. Lost Souls, Nothing fifty years later.
1. Eyes Like Nia

Author's Note: Most of the characters involved in the following are the exclusive property of Poppy Z

Author's Note: Most of the characters involved in the following are the exclusive property of Poppy Z. 

Brite. A very few of them aren't, because they are characters that have been developed 

by myself and the collaborative efforts of Naomi, Mark and Sarah. Much appreciation 

goes out to them for their assistance. Let me preface this by saying that I've been 

roleplaying Nothing for over a year now on AOL (for those of you on aol, the SN is 

xixnothingxix), so I've taken some creative license with Brite's original concept. It 

takes place fifty years after the 'death' of Zillah, on the streets of New Orleans. This 

one's going to be pretty tame, there will undoubtedly be chapters to follow. Stay tuned.

By the way: Sometimes it takes me awhile to get a plot built. Just..hang in there. I'm getting to a 

point, I swear. 

Nothing stalked offstage just before the house lights came up. The crowd was still enthralled in a frenetic whirlwind of shots and cheers, screams and sweat, pushed to the limits by the burning, bleeding intensity of the singer they so adored. One of the roadies handed him a cigarette on the way to the dressing rooms, which he took without smiling, shoving a small hand into the pocket of worn black jeans and fishing for a bright pink plastic lighter. With a rolling of black electric tape wrapped thumb, he lit the cigarette with one hand. With the other he shoved a curtain of dyed black hair behind an ear impatiently. 

"There's a man who's been comin' 'round here askin' about you, cher." 

Nothing blinked, twin pools of inkwell turbulence shifting their attentions to the girl who had spoken. She had short hair, black as midnight, clipped sleek and chic to frame her jaw. She wore a black leather corset with her black velvet broomstick skirt. She had eyes of the most intense, unfathomable electric green imaginable, that shade of neon brilliance that imprints itself just behind your eyelids and haunts you in your sleep, equalled by no other living creature. Living, that is. 

"Oh yeah?" The singer took a harsh drag off that Lucky Strike, filling his lungs with acrid smoke as he studied Nia, the proprietress, in the haze. It had been twenty years or more since he'd been to New Orleans. Who could possibly remember him well enough to know that he was back? 

Just then another girl joined them, her purple braided extensions pulled up in pigtails on either side of her head. She wrapped both arms around Nia's waist and laid a head on her shoulder, Nia smiling like the proud owner of a prize winning, pedigreed pet. 

Devi nodded. "Yeah…" she trailed off, glancing up at her girlfriend for approval. Nia nodded slightly, tangling her fingers in purple braids. "…this guy I met the other night while I was downstairs at the Absinthe House. He said he was looking for a boy, a skinny little boy with big black eyes like a Cajun swamp and hair dyed black to match. Said he'd probably be travelin' with two other boys that looked like twins but weren't really. Said he'd known you a long time." 

Nothing's heart misfired, snagging itself on barbed wire and exploding into action once it remembered that it had stopped. His mind swam with possibilities; impossibilities, a crazy tornado of thoughts like a swarm of bees between his ears. With shaking fingers, he lifted his temporarily forgotten cigarette, dragging fiercely, exhaling a cloud of bluish smoke to separate himself from Devi's words. The little girl, just a little bit spacey on pain killers and alcohol, grinned up at him like a chesire cat. 

"He was quite handsome, Nothing." Nia looked sharply at the girl in her arms, 

she had a possessive jealous streak a mile wide. Devi trailed off again, her voice

singsong and discordant. "He knew your name. He had eyes like Nia." 


	2. In His Blood

"Double, double, toil and trouble; 

Author's Note: Ugh. I keep forgetting to do author's notes. Okay. So…this one is Nothing, with Cameo Appearances of Molochai, Twig, and another voice you might or might not recognize yet. (All courtesy of, property of, brilliance of, the illustrious Poppy Z. Brite) Nothing has a bad dream and smokes rather a lot of cigarettes. Living situation implied. Still pretty tame…it's all in the implications. But I know where it's going now…bumped to a PG-13 for sheer irreverence. Enjoy. 

"_Double, double, toil and trouble; _

Fire burn and cauldron bubble. 

By the prickin' o' my thumbs—

Something Wicked this way comes."

-Shakespeare, the Scottish Play

The room was dark, swirling with cacophonic symphonies of sound that couldn't be deciphered into actual, individual, distinguishable verses. The words melted together like popsicles in July; their colors blending and folding into one another as though all of space and time had become one great Funhouse Mirror. Faces came out of the dark, laughing, frowning, looking reproachful, looking angry, looking sad. And every where were whispers, a giddy gleeful singsong admonishment that flooded the eyes and ears and nose and throat and drowned the victim in their simple honesty. _Traitor._

* * * 

Dark eyes flashed open in the night and Nothing awoke with a start, blinking back the electrified reality of pure, wild green as he stared blankly at the ceiling. His sparrow skinny frame was slicked with sweat and he gasped; he couldn't breathe. He came to in a dense tangle of arms and legs and sugar and sex and the thick black tangles that covered his face were choking him, weren't his. Like swimming through an ocean of nightmares he used both hands as paddles to guide himself through the obstructions, dislodging a face-an arm-a shoulder-a set of fingers-a knee-a foot as he sat up, struggling for air. There was a sharp, stinging pain in his right shoulder and he lifted two fingertips to touch it. They came away sticky, he put them to his lips. Grape. Molochai. Nothing sighed, expelling breath with enough force to ruffle tangled strands of artificial ink before he raked them back out of the way with a baby claw, the taste of chartreuse and strawberry incense still strong on the back of his throat. 

Nothing squirmed and wriggled and writhed his way out from between the mess of limbs and wrappers that was Twig and Molochai's twisted embrace, watching with downcast eyes as those two bodies—each easily engulfing him on its own—converged on one another in his absence; filling the whole where the warmth of another body once had been. When the two of them had filled all the spaces between them they stilled, Molochai's mouth latching into Twig's shoulder the way it had on Nothing's just moments before. He stood, bare feet crinkling on sugar coated cellophane, one angular hip jutted just so as he surveyed the room. It was, as per usual, trashed; littered an inch deep with the remains of lollipops and Debbie cakes and broken empty bottles. He kicked his way through it, clearing a path out onto balcony, letting the cool night air bathe his naked skin. He couldn't shake the dream, the whispers that echoed in his mind. Falling onto a rusty chaise lounge with some of its plastic slats missing, he closed sharp fingers around the neck of an overlooked bottle of chartreuse. Bringing it to his lips, those stormy eyes fell closed for a moment as he inhaled its scent. Pine, anise; one hundred and seventeen other flavors and you could taste them all if you paid attention. He tipped the bottle and felt it burn all the way down, green fire flooding his nose and mouth and throat and lungs so that he saw and heard and touched and tasted green and the fire roiled all the while in his belly. 

Twenty minutes later, he still couldn't shake it. That voice, that raspy gleeful giddy whisper followed him even when he went back inside a moment, wading through the refuse as he fished for his cigarettes. It wrapped himself around him like a blanket as he reclined, naked and chain-smoking, on a slightly bent chair on the balcony of an abandoned Presbyterian Church in the middle of the night. It taunted him, babbling horrific nothings in his ears as he drank, licked at his skin lewdly when he went inside to take a shower. Only much later, frustrated and furious and overwhelmed with an impending sense of dread, did he realized the truth of it. 

The voice was inside him. The message was in his blood. 


	3. Strawberry Incense

Author's Note: Many thank yous to all of you who've supported me, sorry it's taken so long to get around   
to writing more. You know how these things work sometimes...anyhow. No, the surprise guest isn't Zillah (though he's obviously involved) and it isn't Ghost either. (he comes later) Think more obscure....or just, read on. In this one we step back in time, so hang on to your hats as at least some of the mystery is revealed. As usual, none of the characters involved are mine; not in this one anyway. Property of Poppy Z. Brite and all that. Right. On with the show.   
  
  
Zillah came to with a single word on his lips. Traitor. The sound of his own voice was alien to him, it sounded like rusty barbed wire dragged across a Formica tabletop. Vision came to him by degrees, the world coming into focus above him one color at a time. Squinting a little in the grayish gloom of an unlit room, Zillah's soft pink lips were drawn up in jagged angles of disgust; his mouth tasted like blood. It wasn't something he usually considered unpleasant, but this was old blood. Settled blood. Rotting blood. His own blood.   
  
With effort, he made himself sit up, tangled caramel caked with ...something...falling around him in tattered curtains. Muscles sang a strident cry of protest, winding tight on rusted spring coils as though they hadn't been used in years. His vision blurred again, what few colors there were melting together for a dizzy sea sick moment before the world righted itself again behind his eyes. Shutting them tight for a moment, his mind was filled with images of pretty faces, leering, peering, giggling gleefully. But they weren't sharp and focused, like reality. They were blurred and fuzzy, like something out of a dream. Something out of several dreams, all folded together into one crazy jigsaw. Puzzling out this curious imagery, his intensity of focus was so pronounced that he didn't even hear the voices. Not until his mind registered something more deeply disturbing. A high-pitched, girlish giggle. "Look, brother, he's awake."   
  
His first reaction, pure muscle memory. Before he even realized what he'd done he was on his feet, back against a corner of the room. This elicited peals of singsong laughter from his specter hosts, and eyes like phosphorescent limes spun wildly in search of its source, knowing somewhere deep inside that he should already have recognized it by now. As his wild-eyed gaze scattered, it fell over objects that should have meant something to him. Hot pink sneakers, their laces scrawled in brightly colored obscenities. A battered raincoat that had definitely seen better years. A shattered bottle of chartreuse lay on its side. A razorblade, smudged dark brown with blood long dried. A battered raincoat. Should have meant something. Did mean something. All at once it all came back to him, crashing in on his curiously silent mind in a furious avalanche of Technicolor proportions. But it didn't make sense. How was this possible? He remembered the knife, that brain-numbing rage....and then there was silence. A last thought, pure and vehement, before everything went black. Traitor. But how could this be?   
  
Distantly he noticed the scent of strawberry incense. The even subtler fragrance of ancient death. Both of them stale, clinging to the walls in dismal clouds like cigarette smoke. Zillah's senses were coming back to him in a steady stream now, and along with them all of his memories. He connected the one with the other and his gaze slid immediately to the closet. He swallowed against the bitter taste that had sunk its velvet claws into the back of his tongue. When he uttered his singular command, his voice came out clearer than it had before. It gave him hope. "Show yourself."   
  
After a moment of presence-filled silence, they obliged him. Taking shape from a handful of moth-eaten clothes, they stepped out of the closet together wound tightly in one another's arms. Joined at the hip, it seemed, their milk pale bodies meshed as one single entity with twice the appropriate number of limbs. One had hair the color of flax or straw, as brilliantly yellow as the sun in a child's crayon portrait; the other's was equally as red. They had like-minded grins as terrible as Cheshire cats', lips painted a gaudy, whorish red and dripping, and it was all too apparent that they were pleased with themselves. "What are you doing here?"   
  
"We fixed you," one of them, the blonde one, said.   
"Yessssssss," the red twin all but hissed.   
"You were too pretty to be all broken," again, the blonde.   
"...So we made it better..."   
"Yesss...aaaaaallll better...."   
  
Their voices were like sand paper on silk, dry and rasping despite their glamour. Zillah looked from the one of them to the other, back and forth like a tennis match, sorting out the details of his apparent reconstruction. All of their kind knew about the twins, their awful brand of particular power. What they weren't especially known for was their generosity? ...A will to create instead of destroy? According to their husky chanting, voices like death rattles, they had restored him from....the accident...because he was pretty. Accident? Traitor. Anger clouded those beautiful features, so painstakingly rebuilt, and drained again only to be replaced by something else.   
  
"Yesss........." crooned the red twin, singing to himself as he held his brother and swayed.   
"Yesss........." mimicked the yellow one. ".....We know where he is...."   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
